Idle thoughts on cinema in 500 words (give or take a few). by Ian Scott Todd

4.20.2016

Sleeping with Curt McDowell

In bed:McDowell speaking to the camera in Confessions (1972).

…and
from the sacred (The Ten Commandments)
back to the profane: last weekend I revisited the short films of the late Curt
McDowell, the San Francisco-based underground filmmaker perhaps best known for
collaborating with his teacher, mentor, and sometime lover George Kuchar on the
cult epic Thundercrack! (1975). Thundercrack!
has recently been released on Blu-ray by Synapse Films, which has also
thrown in a bonus disc containing five of McDowell’s shorts. McDowell’s all-too-brief career—he was most
active from 1970 to 1975, contracted AIDS in the mid 1980s, and died in
1987—roughly divides between Kuchar-flavored camp comedies and pornographic
diary films in which he attempted to give expression to his deepest sexual
fantasies.

At the park: one of the subjects of Loads (1985).

I
first read about McDowell’s sex films in an essay by Thomas Waugh in which he
describes McDowell’s Loads (1985) as
“so hot that it makes Kansas City Trucking Co.feel like a three-hour Marguerite Duras film projected at half
speed.” Waugh praises McDowell as an
experimental filmmaker whose exploration of sex is an example of “an
alternative practice, a grass-roots pornography to counter the industrial
pornography; an eroticism that enhances our pleasure in our sexuality by
starting from the raw place we’re in right now and by responding to that place,
without defensiveness or complacency, but with honesty, questioning, and
humor.” Confessions (1972), for example, intercuts footage of sex and
masturbation with interviews in which McDowell’s friends tell him how they feel
about him, and opens with a monologue in which McDowell, addressing the camera,
comes out to his parents (and subsequently breaks down in tears).

As
pornography goes, Confessions may as
well be set in another universe from Deep Throat, made the same year.It finds McDowell using images of “hard
core” sex to articulate something intensely private about himself. The film is a portrait of the artist in which
sex is seen as central rather than peripheral to his identity. (Nearly everyone who knew McDowell has
testified to his voracious sexual appetite.)
Where much mainstream pornography of the 1970s aimed to please its audience(s)
by catering to their presumed fantasies and desires, McDowell’s films are
defiantly personal works in which sex becomes a way for him to explore his own
truth.

In the studio: McDowell with male stranger in Loads.

Loads is perhaps the most
powerfully erotic of McDowell’s sex films, and a remarkable example of how the
gaps between pornography, documentary, and experimental cinema may be bridged. In this film McDowell uses voice-over
narration to speak candidly and unapologetically about his attraction to
straight men. The six male strangers
seen in the film are picked up by McDowell in the park or on the street and
invited back to his studio, where McDowell films them stripping and posing, and
proceeds to service them sexually. What
makes this film so striking is not the elaborate nature of the sex scenes
(which, being enacted by amateurs, is mostly perfunctory) but rather the
intensity of McDowell’s erotic desire, which the film expresses so
nakedly. As McDowell recounts his various
sexual exploits, we hear the arousal creep into his voice, eventually overtaking
him altogether. The film becomes
suffused with a sexual tension that feels all the more concentrated because we
know it’s coming from someplace real. All
of McDowell’s sex films are governed by a confessional impulse—a need to show
us who he is as well as to discover it for himself.